I write about innovation, careers,and unforgettable personalities. My Forbes magazine cover stories have analyzed Sequoia Capital, LinkedIn, Amazon and Hewlett-Packard. In 1997, while at The Wall Street Journal, I shared in a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. Along the way, I've written four books: "Merchants of Debt," "Health Against Wealth," "Perfect Enough" and "The Rare Find." Contact me anytime at GCAForbes@gmail.com

The 4,000 Tribes of Reddit: Who Are These People?

Poking around Reddit, I’ve come to believe, is a bit like exploring the world’s largest magazine rack. The wildly popular Internet site is divided into thousands of special sections, or subreddits, that focus on everything from Argentina to zombies. Some of these zones are silly; others can be snarky or sincere; scholarly or vulgar.

There’s something for everyone. About 4,000 subreddits are active enough to attract new posts or comments each day, and the wild diversity of the tribes frequenting these subsites may be Reddit’s greatest asset. While researching a recent FORBES magazine feature on Reddit’s valuation, I began quizzing insiders about what they regard as some of the site’s most enchanting, goofy or unpredictable sections. The result: this sampling of what you can find on Reddit, ranked in descending order of popularity.

/r/TodayILearned(2.3 million subscribers) This subreddit is flooded every day with readers’ favorite oddball facts, along with an occasional urban legend that becomes a target for debunkers. For example, did you know that banana trees are actually giant herbs? Or that a Spanish woman claims she legally owns the sun?

/r/Atheism (1.3 million) Where godless souls meet, so they can take turns denying Jesus, Allah, the Dalai Lama and so on.

/r/AskScience (640,000) “What would happen if we didn’t have clouds?” Redditors live for moments like this: 167 geeks are furiously debating the likely extent of night cooling, the end of rivers and other possibilities.

/r/trees (338,000) Arborists may have their own subreddit, but not this one. Here, “trees” is a code word for marijuana, and potheads abound.

/r/MaleFashionAdvice (162,000) Nerds helping nerds. Redditors take turns advising one another on how to buy that first blazer. Watch out, GQ.

r/TwoXChromosomes (112,000): A totally different vibe; female Redditors congregate here to talk about surgeries, sexism, dating and women in the military. Male visitors may stop by quietly, but house rules ban “hatred, misogyny and utter idiocy.”

/r/FifthWorldProblems (28,000) Troubles with time travel? Your peers here will understand. A typical lament: “I had a sip of the Milky Way. Turns out I’m galactose intolerant.”

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Love your analogy comparing browsing subbreddits to “Exploring the world’s largest magazine rack”! There is even “Subreddit of the Day”, a subreddit for discovering other subreddits! It can be found at http://www.reddit.com/r/subredditoftheday

Also, as one of the developers for the online drawing game Doodle or Die, I’m thrilled that players created and use a Doodle or Die (http://www.reddit.com/r/doodleordie) subreddit to share and comment on the hilarious drawings they find!

I’m really really tired of people like you writing articles which incorrectly define subreddits I moderate. The /r/NSFW subreddit is in no way dedicated to gore, it is for pornographic material only.

From the sidebar and subreddit description:

“From a single tit to the hardest of the hardcore, /r/nsfw is an all-encompassing pornography subreddit.”

“NSFW is typically used to describe Internet content generally inappropriate for the typical workplace, i.e., would not be acceptable in the presence of your boss and colleagues (as opposed to SFW, Safe For Work)”

“NSFW is not **NSFL**. Offending posts will be removed.”

We state specifically that NSFW is different from “Not Safe For LIFE”. NSFL content encompasses the gore content that you reference that is absolutely not welcome on /r/NSFW.

As Dave points out below, you also go out of your way to use the loaded term “pothead” when describing the /r/trees subreddit and describe fashion-conscious males as “nerds” from the /r/malefashionadvice subreddit.

Why should anyone take you seriously or listen to what you have to say about Reddit when you can’t be bothered to accurately or appropriately describe these subreddits, especially when the descriptions are available to you and you simply ignore them in order to apply your own slanted language?

Next time consider not pumping out a hastily-written article simply because Reddit is the flavor of your week.

To borrow a phrase from Reddit, your article is bad and you should feel bad.

Can this really be a comment from the moderator of /r/NSFW?? I’d figured that anyone devoted to curating pictures of naked people would be feeling pretty good about life. But your post is drenched with frustration and bitterness. You asked for the word “gore” to be removed, and it is gone. Is everything else OK?

I’m simply tired of people like you who write about Reddit but obviously don’t understand it. Your audience is made of people who don’t frequent the site and your words might be the only representation those people have on which to form their opinion. Do you not feel any responsibility to at least convey an accurate message? From where I sit, the answer is obviously “no”.

Forgive me for taking offense to what was more than likely fluffy filler for your blog – I’m simply tired of people like you writing stories about Reddit when you obviously know nothing about the community.

If you want to continue writing about Reddit, I believe you have a responsibility to your audience to produce something more worthwhile than to simply give it the lip-service that you have with this piece. The piece on the valuation of Reddit was much better IMO because you were talking about a portion of the site that you are actually comfortable with – business.

You’ll also have to forgive me for using you as my example – there are many, many people doing the same thing around the webs these days.

Hi Scop: Thanks for adjusting the tone … we can have a much better conversation now. I’m always willing to keep a dialogue going with readers/experts who care about their subjects. Bear in mind that in your first post you referred to subreddits that “I moderate.” That made me think that you were the lead moderator here. If you’d said “that I help moderate,” that would have been clearer. Anyway, I did talk to more than a dozen Reddit moderators in the course of researching my trio of pieces, and fact-checked this particular piece with a Reddit admin. But our exchange is a good reminder that everyone knows a piece of Reddit; no one knows the whole site. Feel free to follow up via email – I’m first.last name at gmail.